No president in our nation's history has spent as much as Obama or
run up more debt. His plan would result in a monstrous $744 billion budget
deficit in 2014. It projects the national debt would grow to an
unprecedented $25 trillion over the next decade from today's $16.8
trillion.

That will further endanger the government's already shaky solvency
and undermine our economic future.

Despite a weak economy that grew by only 0.6 percent in the fourth
quarter of 2012, and the snail's pace job growth that shrank sharply last
month, his budget calls for nearly $700 billion in new taxes on employers,
investors, and households in the highest tax brackets. Even smokers would
have to pay nearly $1 more for a pack of cigarettes.

If you thought Obama's class warfare ended with his re-election
campaign, forget it. In addition to raising taxes on just about anything
that moves, he wants to impose a new minimum tax rate of 30 percent on
people who make more than $1 million a year.

And brace yourself, because he says he's not budging this time from
his demand for higher tax rates. Any budget deal later this year, he said
Wednesday in his remarks in the White House rose garden, must raise new
tax revenue from "the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations."

And that's on top of the $600 billion he has previously approved in
higher income taxes on Americans earning more than $400,000 a year.
In the space of two years, he will squeeze $1.3 trillion more out of our
sluggish, over-taxed, under-invested economy when millions of struggling
businesses are hiring less and many Americans can't find full-time jobs.

This is an economy that cries out for bold, new initiatives to boost
venture capital investment for business expansion and new start- ups to
put people back to work.But Obama's budget doesn't offer one substantive
initiative that would do this.

Instead, he wants hundreds of billions in more spending -- at least
$300 billion more just for additional public works jobs on top of the
nearly $800 billion he poured into similar projects in his first term. All
that spending had little if any lasting impact on the economy or the real
unemployment rate, now estimated at nearly 14 percent if you add
part-timers who need full-time jobs and discouraged adults who stopped
looking for work.

His latest budget plan is bulging with new spending for the laundry
list of initiatives he spelled out in his expensive State of the Union
address, including an ambitious $77 billion expansion of pre- school
education. And that's just for starters.

There's more money for his green energy boondoggles that have led to
embarrassing bankruptcies and relatively few jobs. There's $100 billion
for roads and railways, $1 billion for 15 new federal institutes to teach
innovation to manufacturers, and $8 billion for community colleges to help
students obtain jobs. The spending list is seemingly endless.

Ask economists what is driving the government's higher deficits --
besides entitlements and discretionary spending -- and they'll point to
weak economic growth and the high unemployment rates that have squeezed
government tax revenues. Obama's anti-job growth budget is Exhibit A in
both cases.

His budget also calls for modest cuts in Social Security benefits by
curbing the way annual cost of living increases are measured. But the
Democrats will never vote to slow the growth in entitlements.

When Obama took office in 2009, he promised to cut the deficit in
half by the end of his first term. He's never come close.

Obama's record-shattering deficits since he took office: $1.4
trillion in 2009; $1.3 trillion in 2010; $1.3 trillion in 2011; $1.2
trillion in 2012; and nearly $900 billion this year, according to the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Unprecedented federal spending levels, far in excess of the
government's income, are also fattening the publicly held debt as a
percentage of the U.S. economy. In 2010, that debt rose to more than
50 percent of the economy.

Under Obama's budget it would get worse, a lot worse. According to
CBO, the ballooning debt will be 87.4 percent of the economy by
2021 if steps are not taken to slow the rate of spending and strengthen
economic growth.

"Obama turned a temporary expansion of government, through TARP and
the auto bailouts, into a permanent expansion of government," says
Stanford University economist Keith Hennessey.

"Before Obama, federal spending averaged 20 percent of GDP (the
economy's entire gross domestic product) for decades. Now he is presiding
over a much bigger government, at 24 percent," Hennessey says.

Obama wasn't in a hurry to send this budget to Capitol Hill. He was
no doubt taking time to ruminate about his politically risky proposal to
cut into Social Security cost-of-living increases would fare in his own
party. They didn't like it.

While the change in the inflation measurement sounds courageous, it
would reduce future cost of living increases by a mere three-tenths of one
percentage point annually, or about $13 billion a year. In terms of the
huge insolvency gap we face from entitlements, his thimble-sized proposal
hardly nicked the problem.

Or maybe Obama realized that presidential budgets, for all the media
attention, are routinely ignored by Congress. In this case, though, the
House and Senate budgets had already left the station before his plan got
there.

Arriving 65 days late, this is the first time in almost 100 years
that a president has sent his budget to the Hill long after House

Republicans and Senate Democrats adopted their own spending plans.

There's a vast difference between Congress's versions. The House
raises no taxes, balances the budget and reforms Medicare, offering a
choice between the existing system or a federally-assisted, less costly
private plan.

The Senate's bill would raise taxes, doesn't balance the budget and
ignores entitlements. In fact, four Democrats voted against it.

The unfathomable policy-making gulf between the two still seems
beyond the reach of any possible compromise. There is no way the House
will vote to raise either taxes or spending.

But with Obama's plan on the burial list, maybe there's a glimmer of
hope that a scaled down budget with no new taxes can emerge later this
year. We'll see.